Mike's Notes
Another wonderful resource list from the one and only Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine fame.
There were too many links to copy here, so check out the original post.
Thanks, Vitaly. 😎
Resources
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/useful-books-designers-who-work-complex-problems-vitaly-friedman-v237f/
- https://www.hardproblems.com/articles/books-designers-hard-problems
References
- Reference
Repository
- Home > Ajabbi Research > Library > Subscriptions > Smashing Magazine
- Home > Handbook >
Last Updated
12/09/2026
Useful Books For Designers Working On Complex Problems
Vitaly Friedman: Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX workshops. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems. He also runs Smart Interface Design Patterns, a video course and UX training for passionate UX designers.
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Chances are high that you are working on a challenging, complex product. And perhaps in a difficult and heavily restricted environment, too — a workplace with deep organizational hierarchy, domain complexity, entrenched culture, untamed legacy and conflicting priorities from opinionated stakeholders at every turn.
How do you thrive and survive in such environments? Well, there are no quick answers to that question. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a fantastic overview by Daniel Burka, with books for designers who are setting out to make a lasting difference — in healthcare, education, public service, climate change. So I thought I'll put together a few of my personal book recommendations as well. Let's take a look.
My personal book recommendations for designers working on hard, complex problems.
My Personal Book Recommendations
- How Big Things Get Done, by Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Fantastic research on why complex projects run late and over budget, why right-to-left thinking matters and how to minimize risks of failures and delays.
- Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. A fantastic book on how to better understand messy reality by learning where progress has happened, where challenges remain and how evidence can guide better decisions.
- The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. A fictional novel, but a truly insightful book on the importance of flow, bottlenecks and operations in a product/IT company.
- The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt. A legendary classic on improving a system by finding and fixing bottlenecks — for PMs and product or staff designers.
- Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows. Probably the clearest guide I could find about systems thinking, feedback loops and how to intervene at the right time, with the right pace at the right place.
- Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. An insightful deep-dive into how people make daily decisions, and how to deal with overwhelming choices.
- The Culture Map, by Erin Meyer. A wonderful book on how to communicate and work with truly global teams across cultures — from feedback and trust to collaboration and decision-making.
- Articulating Design Decisions, by Tom Greever. A very practical strategic book on how to communicate UX work effectively to senior management and people who need to approve your work.
- Narrative Economics, by Robert Shiller. A book focused on economy, but really about how ideas move markets. A great read on how contagious stories, not just data, drive decisions, events and spread impact over time.
- Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte. A deep, dense classic on how to deal with complex data and how to display it to maximize clarity. A must-read for every data visualization work.
Not really books for designers, and not books about design either. But great books about planning and thinking: How Big Thigns Get Done and Algorithms To Live By.
- The Great Mental Models, by Shane Parrish. How people think, grasp new areas, find patterns and understand the world. A lovely series about mental models and how people think.
- A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. Actually a book about patterns in architecture, but also about how spaces are organized, and how to think of living and working systems.
- Org Design for Design Orgs, by Peter Merholz, Kristin Skinner. How to build, structure and scale in-house design teams — on hiring, roles and operating models. Not a topic that's often covered.
- Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke. Perhaps a bit of a cliché recommendation, but a lovely book on how to make better decisions under uncertainty, when you don't have enough evidence.
- The Missing Billionaires, by Victor Haghani and James White. To me, a fantastic book about risk management without being a risk management book. How to strategically approach risk and financial decisions over a long period of time.
- Why Design Is Hard, by Scott Berkun. A lovely little book about the inherent complexities and challenges of the design process.
- Practical Charts, by Nick Desbarats. The only practical guide to charts that I found incredibly easy to understand. A must-read for data viz and dashboard design.
- The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. A classic. A very short book that entirely changed how I think about design decades ago.
New Books For UX and Interface Designers
There are quite a few new UX books that I have on my reading list (and had on it for quite some time), but actually didn't yet find time to get into. So if you're looking for a new book for yourself or for your colleagues, here are a few recent ones that caught my attention (published between 2025 and 2026). I hope you'll find them useful, too.
UX & Product Design
- Inviting Depth: Richer Research Interviews, by Brandon Berry PhD, Thomas Williams. How to conduct more meaningful research interviews and help researchers uncover deeper insights from users.
- Research Practice, by Gregg Bernstein. With practical advice and frameworks for effective and ethical research practices.
- Sentient Design, by Veronika Kindred, Josh Clark. A practical book on how to use AI effectively to design "intelligent" experiences, with many useful insights and practical techniques.
- UX for AI: A Framework for Designing AI‑Driven Products, by Greg Nudelman. Quite technical at times, but packed with real case studies of how products teams design and build AI experiences from scratch. Currently reading.
- The Designer's Guide To The Buttons, by Andrey Markelov. Actually a mix of a history book about interfaces and UI components — a comprehensive visual guide to the history, logic, and evolution of user interfaces, from Xerox Alto to Vision Pro.
- Building The Research Engine, by Julian Della Mattia. A practical guide on how to set up a research practice from scratch and how to make sure that research efforts are noticed and its outcomes are actually used.
- Shift Happens, by Marcin Wichary. An extensive (!) research on the history of keyboards, keyboard layouts — from early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pocket. Sadly sold out at the moment.
- Designed With Care, curated by Rachel Edwards. A beautiful overview of how to create inclusive trauma-informed content across various domains.
- Staff Product Designer, by Artiom Dashinsky. A very honest and practical deep-dive into senior product design roles and career progression.
- Everything is a Prototype, by Brendan Kearns. How to prototype better, with tools for more productive experimentation.
- Accessible UX Research, by Michele A. Williams, PhD. Our new Smashing book, on how to conduct inclusive UX research — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias and building trust.
- Good Services, by Lou Downe. Focuses on the principles behind designing digital services that actually work for people.
- The Solo: Grow Your Own Digital Products, by Christine Vallaure de la Paz. A practical guide for designers looking to create and scale up their own digital products.
- The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985–1993, by Jordan Mechner. Per se not a classic design book, but a deep dive into how the legendary game I was playing for months came to be.
- The Core Model Digital Strategy, by Are Halland. How to approach digital strategy and more strategic, collaborative design.
- The Path to Senior Product Designer, by Artiom Dashinsky. Another book by Artiom, focusing on the journey and skills required for senior-level product design.
- Hey UX, Hey PM, by Jeff Carpenter. Interesting: explores collaboration and communication between designers and product managers.
- The Staff Designer, by 🐱 Catt Small 👩🏾💻. A guide for staff ICs on how to grow, influence, and lead effectively without moving into people management. Catt has a great Maven cohort as well.
Dashboards and Data Visualization
- CHART: Designing Creative Data Visualizations from Charts to Art, by Nadieh Bremer. Very high on my list as I would trust Nadieh on everything data visualization! How to transform data into impactful visual narratives, moving beyond standard charts.
- Dashboards That Deliver, by Steve Wexler, Jeffrey Shaffer, Andy Cotgreave, Amanda Makulec. New book on designing impactful dashboards with insights and drive action.
- Speak Data, by Giorgia Lupi, Phillip Cox. An interesting book on how to communicate complex data effectively. Great for a kitchen table, too!
- Practical Charts, by Nick Desbarats. A hands-on guide to designing honest and functional charts, with useful decision trees to use.
Cards & Cheat Sheets
For quick reference, here are few lovely card decks and cheat sheets:
- Storyteller Tactics, by Steve Rawling. A legendary deck of cards to design compelling narratives for presentations and user stories.
- UX Research Cheat Sheets, by Stéphanie Walter. Helpful user interview question cheat sheets, question cards and UXR workshop templates.
- UI Fonts Checklist, by Oliver Schöndorfer. A practical guide to selecting typefaces for UI design.
- Smart Interface Design Patterns, by yours truly Vitaly Friedman. My little collection of useful checklist cards for pretty much any UI component!
“But What About AI?”
There are strong voices arguing that many of these books belong to the pre-AI era, and hence they are slightly outdated and not particularly useful.
I strongly disagree. I don't really think that AI makes these books less relevant today — if anything, AI probably amplifies a desperate need for these books to be written and published and read. And I don't think AI can turn good intentions with poor ideas into good design — even with the best context and design harness provided to it.
In the world where we can generate hundreds of flows and prototypes quickly, or hyper-personalize experiences to every individual user, we need to make very, very good decisions on which flows are driving us towards a goal, and how our work drives users to their goals as well.
The books above are about better judgment, about critical and strategic thinking, human-led research, better sense-making and decision making. AI can surely augment it, but the quality lies in humans curating and choosing directions and making better decisions as a result. I'm quite skeptical about people allowing AI to fully take over decisions any time soon.
Useful UX Book Lists
And just in case you need more specialized book recommendations — for entrepreneurs, researchers, accessibility professionals, product managers or behavioral scientists, here are a few useful bookmarks of recommendations by other fine folks.
50 Short Books For Designers, brought together by David Demaree and the team at Bits&Letters.
- 50 Short Books For Designers, a wonderful directory of free and non-free books, published by A Book Apart, but then disappearing from the web — now brought together in one single place, with freely available versions, references and links in one place. Kindly put together by David Demaree and the team at Bits&Letters.
- Free Books For Interface & UX Designers
- Book Recommendations, by Stripe Press
- UX Research Books, by Stéphanie Walter
- Inclusive Design Books, by Jessica Ivins
- Books For Accessible Products, by Cat Noone
- Books For Entrepreneurs, by Intercom
- Product Management Books, by Paweł Huryn
- Behavioral Science Books, by Robert Meza
- Data Visualization Books, by Nadieh Bremer
- Business Books For Designers, by Chris Do
- Interface Design Books, by Adham Dannaway
Wrapping Up
The world desperately needs patient and passionate designers to improve the messy, complex and legacy-ridden systems that are so common and so frustrating in daily lives of millions of people.
You might feel stuck — in enterprise environments, education, healthcare and public services; yet that's exactly where your design work can make a tremendous impact for people who need it the most. It's at times a painful but extremely rewarding experience, as long as you bring along enough patience and care.
Just one final note. Many of the authors above also provide an incredible amount of free content for everybody to use and learn from. I kindly encourage you to support their work if you can, and always purchase books from their own recommended sources, rather than discount retailers.
Do you have books you'd add to this list? I'd love to hear your recommendations for books that made a difference for you — please leave a comment below. I try my best to read and answer every single comment and email I receive, so please don't hesitate to reach out.
